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Diablo 3 Waiting Thread - Stay a while and glisten

Posts

Is the level cap still going to be 60? Cause that bothers me the most. And I don't know how much truth comes with this but I've heard on these forums that Blizzard pretty much admits PvP arenas were the worst thing to happen to WoW (I think it's the Death Knight personally but arenas come close) so hopefully they won't follow the same disastrous route WoW PvP did. I never liked WoW arenas and battleground's kind of got stale because I just don't find playing the same maps over and over and over fun. At least arenas had a 3 or 4 to choose from IIRC.

Is the level cap still going to be 60? Cause that bothers me the most. And I don't know how much truth comes with this but I've heard on these forums that Blizzard pretty much admits PvP arenas were the worst thing to happen to WoW (I think it's the Death Knight personally but arenas come close) so hopefully they won't follow the same disastrous route WoW PvP did. I never liked WoW arenas and battleground's kind of got stale because I just don't find playing the same maps over and over and over fun. At least arenas had a 3 or 4 to choose from IIRC.

Blizzard's stance on arenas is that they are a fun competitive option. The mistake they admitted was that arenas became the only competitive option while battlegrounds languished to PUGs.

It's really, really hard to balance any game where the objective is "kill the other guy". Games like Street Fighter have exactly 1 level (big rectangle) and maybe 30 characters that you play one at a time. In Diablo, every different item you get and each possible talent point allocation is effectively a different character, so there are potentially thousands of characters to "balance", although like in WoW, when differential gear is allowed you should just give up on balance.

Things like Battlegrounds work so much better because there is an objective other than "kill everyone", and your skill can come through in how well you work towards objectives outside of how well you kill everyone.

Sceptre: Penny Arcade, where you get starcraft AND marriage advice.
3clipse: The key to any successful marriage is a good mid-game transition.

it would be easier to build a new game from the ground up with the same graphics engine than to try to balance multiple classes separately with the same classes/abilities that were built for the context of diablo-style gameplay.

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be -- or to be indistinguishable from -- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
Neal Stephenson

Finally a worthy class to play if Wizard turns out to have too many close combat abilities. Looks like this is purely shooting with abilities to maneuverer around to avoid damage / getting in close combat.

I think the PVP idea goes like this: Players PVE'd like this with the ancients. Now people are going to take their high characters and start PVPing in arena, which is in fact 10X better than running around trying to collect the best gear that's there.

This is also a good idea because when people like maxing their character's level cap, the level cap could probably be hit in an actual time that is actually convenient for people who actually have a job and not hours upon hours to PVE.

Look at it this way: instead of looking at a ladder which tells you who spends the most time with a bot at end game, people will be creating PVP teams with their friends and try and get to the top of the arena charts. Think reset the ladder without getting a new character.

"Well, as it turns out the Witch Doctor's Plague of Frogs ability is too powerful in PvP, so we've reduced the damage it does by 75%"

For those of you who never played WoW, that is pretty much exactly what happened when they introduced arenas (PvP as a whole was guilty of it in WoW, but it became a far more common occurrence post-Arenas). So yeah. Diablo or not, it's pretty shitty to have an ability (or whatever) you love in a PvE context be completely neutered/removed because of an ancillary portion of the game.

The balance of PvE is all about how fast you can kill huge groups of units.

WoW is successful in both PvE and PvP. Yeah, it took a while to get there but there are huge groups of people enjoying both aspects of the game, and honestly, Diablo should be easier to balance than a MMO where PvE balance is a delicate thing.

Bragging rights is taking down the big bad guy at the end of the game for WoW.
Bragging rights in Diablo is all about the cool equipment and max level. Now there's PvP ranking (which is less hardcore than WoW arenas, btw) and PvP achievments to add to that!

Nothing bad about the PvP announcement. It's better than "xXPwnballzXx has become hostile towards you!" or whatever the stupid message was. You were forced into PvP unless you played alone or in private games. Now it's (hopefully?) separated and optional. You don't ever have to touch PvP if you don't want to.

Our system is focused on encouraging furious combat and multiplayer progression, not stringent competitive rankings, so you'll earn points after every match and Battle.net matchmaking will pit you against similarly skilled opponents.

I do get the complaints though in relation to WoW. If you've spent all your time leveling your character to lvl. super awesome and then Blizzard decides to nerf the shit out of your skills, I'd be pissed too.

The difference is that going to lvl. super awesome in D3 takes like three days, whereas in WoW it takes months.

The balance of PvE is all about how fast you can kill huge groups of units.

And if PvP balancing makes it so that one class suddenly becomes significantly worse at killing huge groups of units as fast as possible, especially to the point where the players of that class feel they need to reroll to be useful, PvE balance is screwed.

The balance of PvE is all about how fast you can kill huge groups of units.

And if PvP balancing makes it so that one class suddenly becomes significantly worse at killing huge groups of units as fast as possible, especially to the point where the players of that class feel they need to reroll to be useful, PvE balance is screwed.

Not a big deal, really.

All the classes will be fun to play, they'll all kill things at different speeds (even if there wasn't PvP), and they'll all be "balanced" as much as Diablo 2 can be balanced.

"Well, as it turns out the Witch Doctor's Plague of Frogs ability is too powerful in PvP, so we've reduced the damage it does by 75%"

For those of you who never played WoW, that is pretty much exactly what happened when they introduced arenas (PvP as a whole was guilty of it in WoW, but it became a far more common occurrence post-Arenas). So yeah. Diablo or not, it's pretty shitty to have an ability (or whatever) you love in a PvE context be completely neutered/removed because of an ancillary portion of the game.

That happened in Diablo II, with Thunderstorm.

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be -- or to be indistinguishable from -- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
Neal Stephenson

The balance of PvE is all about how fast you can kill huge groups of units.

And if PvP balancing makes it so that one class suddenly becomes significantly worse at killing huge groups of units as fast as possible, especially to the point where the players of that class feel they need to reroll to be useful, PvE balance is screwed.

Not a big deal, really.

The class you really like has been nerfed to the point of uselessness because of PvP and to be more than dead weight you need to take a class you like less from 1 to 60, but hey, not a big deal, really.

a vampire hunter type class with medium-heavy armor, sweet crossbow skills, some improvised tinker-weapon type stuff like a holy water grenade launcher, and newly-revealed whips would be phenomenal.

kick ass, this is almost exactly what I was hoping for. I hope she gets some close-quarters moves too, but I think this is the most appealing class to me.

I gotta say though, there's something about the pace of the game that doesn't look quite right. It's a little too slow and stiff, not very fluid. I think this game will have some real competition on the gameplay side of things from Torchlight 2.

In my experience with WoW, people (myself included) tended to make a much bigger deal out of PvP/PvE balance changes than was warranted. Everyone always overreacts when they get nerfed. It really won't be that bad, and will bring some organized PvP to Diablo 3. To me, that seems a definite improvement over the rather silly PvP in Diablo 2.

And really, who didn't see arenas coming? What other form of PvP were they going to do?

The class you really like has been nerfed to the point of uselessness because of PvP and to be more than dead weight you need to take a class you like less from 1 to 60, but hey, not a big deal, really.